Content or document management systems organize information in a systematic way so information can be stored, accessed, and distributed effectively. An effective document management system helps an organization to efficiently process, duplicate, distribute, and store documents. Traditionally, organizations have relied on paper or microfiche filing systems for storage and retrieval. Nowadays, more and more organizations are relying on paper-less filing systems, i.e., digital or electronic document management systems (hereinafter “electronic DMS”), to manage documents.
Compared to a paper or microfiche filing system, an electronic DMS reduces the cost in processing, duplicating, distributing, and storing documents; an electronic DMS also enables faster access to and retrieval of documents. In addition, an electronic DMS is capable of managing documents with various formats. A document in an electronic DMS can be any digitized content, such as a word processing file, an audio file, a video file, a spreadsheet, a fax, a database file, an e-mail, a scanned image, or an Internet/intranet HTML document.
Though an electronic DMS offers various economical and operational advantages over a paper or microfiche filing system, a conventional electronic DMS lacks certain desirable document management features. For example, a digital document usually is associated with a set of properties, such as file name, file size, or author of the document. Generally, the software creating a document predefines the properties associated with the document. This pre-setting of properties of an individual document does not allow a user to set properties for a group of documents sharing a common characteristic, for example, the same content type. A content type describes what a document is about. For instance, the content type of this document is patent application. Other examples of content types include project plan, personnel file, etc. A user such as the system administrator of an electronic DMS may wish to define properties and rules to manage documents sharing a common characteristic. For example, a system administrator may want to specify who can access personnel files in an organization. A conventional electronic DMS does not provide such a feature.
In addition, documents in an electronic DMS are generally stored in a document server. Conventionally, once a document is downloaded from the document server, the electronic DMS no longer has control over the behaviors of the document. For example, if a personnel file is downloaded from a document server, the electronic DMS no longer can enforce any access rule on the document.
Furthermore, a conventional electronic DMS allows all property information associated with a downloaded document to be modified and communicated back to a document server. However, in order to exert centralized management of documents sharing a common characteristic, a system administrator of an electronic DMS may prefer rules shared by the documents to remain constant. Hence, it is desirable that rules shared by a group of documents should remain intact in the document server without regard as to how the rules may have been changed in a downloaded document.
Therefore, there exists a need to centrally define properties and rules concerning documents sharing a common characteristic, such as the same content type. There also exists a need to automatically associate such properties and rules with such a document. There further exists a need to ensure that rules governing all documents sharing a common characteristic remain constant, not modifiable by specific settings on an individual document.